Deeplinks Blog posts about DMCA

Vehicle manufacturers like General Motors and John Deere are citing a particularly strange and onerous provision in copyright law to claim that you need permission to tinker with, repair, and innovate around your own car. According to them, you may own the parts, but you don’t own your copies of the car software that makes them work. For months, we have been working to fix that by calling on the Librarian of Congress to issue an exemption to this provision.

The Entertainment Software Association doesn’t want anyone to restore the functionality of older videogames that are no longer supported by their publisher, because, says ESA, this is “hacking,” and all hacking is “associated with piracy.”

Thailand, after the 2014 coup by the Royal Thai Armed Forces unseated its democratic government, sits a disturbing gray area with regard to the due process and the rule of law. While martial law was, in theory, revoked last week, and ordinary governance restored, the military are still clearly in charge, and the current junta still expressly reserve the right to intervene at will. As with the last coup, the current dictatorship has taken advantage of its powers to prepare or pass statutes that will persist, even when (or if) full democratic rule is restored. Among the barrage of laws passed were modifications to Thai copyright and computer crime law. Curiously, a detailed examination of the changes shows among the expected set of restrictions on online freedoms, some positive improvements: that is, if the junta and future Thai governments can be trusted to follow their own rules.

The Internet is celebrating Fair Use Week, and it’s a great time to look at what Congress might do this year to help or hurt the fair use rights of artists, innovators, and citizens. After nearly two years of U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearings and vigorous conversations within government, industry, and the public, it seems like we might see some real proposals. But other than a few insiders, nobody knows for sure whether major changes to copyright law are coming this year, and what they might be.